Perhaps the most exciting consumer electronics innovation of recent times is high-quality virtual reality. It’s quite an extraordinary experience to be completely immersed in a virtual world, whether throwing a racing car around Monaco, scanning the skies around you for bandits in a combat flight sim, or experiencing real vertigo on a virtual rollercoaster.

The pioneer in this field is undoubtedly Oculus; its Rift hardware promised an immersive experience leaps and bounds ahead of anything we'd seen before. It even seduced legendary Doom and Quake developer John Carmack away from id Software to work on the software side. Developer prototype versions of the Rift have been floating round for some time, generating lots of anticipation for the final product.